US Government censors its own report that debunks the gender-wage-gap myth

The following two excerpts from a couple of articles illustrate an instance of government censorship of information that has had a major impact on the promotion of pro-female and anti-male labour legislation.

Rather than using the truth to debunk the need for that intended legislation, the US Government pushed through the passage of that anti-male and discriminatory legislation, while at the same time removing all pointers to the report that had already been published prior to any attempts to have the legislation pass. The truth is now hidden, and the legislation that ostensibly but falsely and unjustifiably addresses non-existent inequities in wages and salaries paid to women now has the force of the law.

US Chamber of Commerce

January 28, 2009

Reasons for Wage Disparity – The Missing Report

by Mike Eastman

Earlier this month (before the end of President Bushs term), the Labor Department released a report called An Analysis of the Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women  it was prepared by a contractor, the CONSAD Research Corporation and included a forward written by the Labor Department.

After the change in administration, we noticed that the report has been removed from the Labor Departments web site. The previous link does not function and other searches on the DOL site have not been successful at finding any reference to the report.This report is very timely  the House has already passed two bills, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act, dealing with pay equity issues  one of those bills could be signed into law by the end of this week. We are disturbed that the DOL would take this step while Congress is considering these important issues  especially in light of the Presidents call for a “new era of openness” in government.

Liberals never tire of convincing persons to believe they are victims in dire need of a government hand-out. But this time it’s a case of outright mendacity aided by the concealment of a high-level government official.

During the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton repeatedly made the claim that women suffer from pay discrimination. Barack Obama’s website likewise asserted, “Despite decades of progress, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Throughout his career, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have championed the right of women to receive equal pay for equal work.”

It was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who engineered the recent passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Act. And just a few weeks ago Rep. George Miller of California made the red-meat assertion that women earn “78 cents for every dollar that is earned by a man doing the same job with the same responsibilities.”

Democrats call it as the “gender wage gap,” but I prefer to think of it as the “scare-the-female-electorate-into-submission” ploy. Claims about sex-based wage discrimination have been repeated so often that many Americans simply accept them as fact. But a recently published  and quickly suppressed  study reveals a different picture.

Titled “An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women,” the report tallies the results of over 50 studies. No one questions the fact that on average, men are paid more than women. But turns out this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The paper concludes the 20-cent odd wage difference is not caused by discrimination. Rather it’s women exercising their right to make lifestyle choices. What choices are we talking about?

1. A greater percentage of women chose to work part-time.

2. Women may opt to leave the work force for childbirth, child care, or elder care.

3. Women are often willing to accept a lower paying job in return for family-friendly policies that allow them to have fewer hours, flexible schedules, and a shorter commute.

In addition, women work fewer hours than men. According to an article posted on the Department of Labor website, “Among full-time workers, 24% of the men, compared to 10% of the women, usually worked more than 40 hours per week:” http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1984/06/art4full.pdf

And then the fact that men tend to work in occupations that are far more likely to injure, maim, or kill….(Full Story)

The US Government is not the first to engage in such a cover-up. There was a similar cover-up of a government-published study report that debunked the wage gap myth. That was during the early 1990’s, in Canada. The report that was covered up then, after it had originally been published at the website of Statistics Canada, was a study report by Ted Wannell and Nathalie Caron, commissioned by Statistics Canada, “THE GENDER EARNINGS GAP AMONG RECENT POSTSECONDARY GRADUATES, 1984-92” (11F0019MPE No. 68, ISBN: 0-662-22499-X).

Abstract:

This study attempts to compare the earnings of men and women on an equal footing by concentrating on recent postsecondary graduates and using survey data on a number of earnings-related characteristics. The data cover three graduating classes of university and community college students: 1982, 1986 and 1990. These data indicate that the gender earnings gap among graduates has narrowed in recent years. In fact among the most recent class, we found that female university graduates are rewarded slightly better than their male counterparts after controlling for experience, job tenure, education and hours of work. A small gender gap persists among community college graduates: about three-and-a-half percent on an hourly wage basis. For all graduates, the earnings gap tended to increase with age, even after controlling for previous work experience….(Full Story)

Carey Roberts, in his article on the wage-gap myth and on the US Government’s efforts to promote that myth and to keep it alive, marvels that,

Claims about sex-based wage discrimination have been repeated so often that many Americans simply accept them as fact. But a recently published  and quickly suppressed  study reveals a different picture.

Nevertheless, even if such revelations of the truth about such persistent myths (there are many comparable myths, such as the age-old canard about male violence) would not be so extremely and purposely short-lived, there is one aspect of such propaganda that must never be forgotten:

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan….

The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter VI

There it is. The task of successful propaganda “is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly,” and therefore includes deliberate censorship of the truth.

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